[Maxima-discuss] Trying to accommodate GCL is keeping us from making progress

[Robert D. <rob...@gm...>]

GCL has several deficiencies, and continuing to accommodate them is
keeping us from implementing various things, aside from being a time
sink.

Things I can remember at the moment, there may be others. Also, this
is aside from dealing with GCL-specific bugs.

 * wildcards in DIRECTORY -- GCL doesn't behave as expected
 * compiling pregexp.lisp -- most recent released version can't
compile pregexp.lisp; most recent unreleased version doesn't build on
my system
 * ASDF, UIOP, Quicklisp -- doesn't work with GCL
 * CFFI -- doesn't work with GCL
 * Unicode characters -- GCL doesn't know about that

Someone's going to say, well, nobody needs any of that stuff. I guess
that's true, but that's not very convincing, right? "We don't need
that" is an all-purpose argument which brings everything to a dead
halt if one really believes it.

I'd like to get to a place where we can talk about the merits of this
feature or that feature, without the conversation immediately getting
derailed by "well, GCL doesn't support that."

I know we've had similar discussions over the years. This week we have
someone volunteering to work on Maxima, so that's what's new.

At this point I'd like to discontinue support for GCL in Maxima, and
discourage package maintainers from trying to use it, since that will
inevitably lead to users reporting non-working features as bugs. Can I
get anybody on board with that?

FWIW

Robert